I was afraid of the digression about Amazon. The kepub reader provides page numbers (ie pages left in each section-perfect for news) and also does not lock in on a CSS file so it permits changes in lines/margins.

Calibre epub-epub conversions with the right settings can fix your latter issue; search the forum for details, as it's been discussed over and over.

As far as I know there is no way of getting pages left in a chapter with sideloads, but you can get a rather nice chapter-marked progress bar (and other terrific tweaks) using ikarus9999's plugin.